To pile rumors onto previous rumors, The L.A. Times and Variety are both running stories in conflict with an earlier report from MTV news, straight from The Departed star Mark Wahlberg’s mouth. While MTV wrote that Martin Scorsese was the driving force behind looking into the plausibility of both a sequel and a prequel to the film (as did their source material – Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs), as well as gauging the interest of one Robert De Niro, The Times states that screenwriter William Monahan is the one doing the legwork, and is solely focused on a sequel at the moment. Variety reports that Monahan “tossed about the idea with Martin Scorsese, albeit informally.” Neither Scorsese or Warner Brothers have commented on the speculation up to this point.

Related: Entertainment Weekly points to this ingenious, straight out of film school breakdown of screenshots from The Departed, by Rene Rodriguez of The Miami Herald. As demonstrated in a collection of 15 shots (example below), Scorsese pays tribute to Howard Hawks’ Scarface by symbolically dropping X’s throughout the film, as Hawks did in 1932.

The DVD releases on February 13th, just 12 days before Scorsese gets another swing at acquiring his first, long overdue Oscar. Doing some investigating of our own, by way of a Departed screener floated to us by an industry source (ha!), our staff has uncovered another odd, single frame snuck into the film: